Apple Arcade is still going and getting plenty of releases. I don’t know anyone buying it specifically but including it in Apple One (competitively priced subscription for most Apple services) means lots of people have access to it. Me and my partner use it a lot. It’s very nice knowing that those games won’t try to shove microtransactions down my throat.

The video is right for all the wrong reasons.

Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2, OBVIOUSLY.

No longer a leak, embargo lifted couple of hours ago.

They could have titled this piece „Vote for Harris because Trump will make your toys more expensive”. Stating that they don’t know what Harris will do is not nuance.

I don’t get it, regular people post on Twitter and traditional media are nice enough to credit them but somehow that becomes some kind of invasion to be stopped in your browser. Yeah, block those share / like buttons but if you just block whole social media platforms outright on purpose then why complain that they don’t work - you chose that yourself.

I don’t think anybody expects change to happen overnight and taking what Trump is saying at face value is a futile effort. Every world power is looking into self sufficiency to avoid another supply shock inflation like during the pandemic, especially with high risk of more regional wars with global impact. Dems want green transformation and chips to drive this but I’m not sure if that’s enough because it doesn’t eliminate dependency in other industries.

My main issue with this reporting is that it’s nauseatingly one sided. US is polarising very quickly at the moment and this only accelerates the process. Far right is gaining momentum because liberal media refuse to acknowledge why people vote for them. Trump will obviously screw blue collar people too but from their point of view at least he’s speaking to them.

It could also mean that manufacturing of those might return to the US. Fuck Trump but US tech media have been insufferably partisan last couple of weeks.

Person commenting above seemed to be negatively affected without knowing the reason and complained about it so I offered advice.

You likely block social media embeds due to overactive or badly set up adblock. Works fine here.

Fair enough, it’s a very divisive game for sure.

I’m FFXIII fanboy and the game gets bad rep so apologies for this uninvited tirade.

If you didn’t give XIII a proper shot then please do. FFXIII battle system is extremely unique and although you have to waddle through 20 hours of tutorials it gets sublime and feels really natural by the second half of the game. That story while cheesy can be as serious as Shin Megami Tensei at times, with people doomed to be trapped between divine powers. Main characters decide not to eat their shit and go against all odds to one of the better soundtracks in series. It all happens along a corridor but the sense of scale does not suffer from it. Sequels to FFXIII are awesome too.

Me along with 3 other Xbox players are still waiting for FFXVI :(

Literally never had the need to disable defender or change anything about my Windows install.

This doesn’t mean anything if you’re not saying what hardware are you running. I saw what was happening in task manager no matter how much time I gave it. I don’t have time to debug a product I paid for, especially if the free alternative „just works”.

Driver support is far better on Windows than Linux.

For things that Linux supports (which is most of it and the older the better) it’s a much better experience since everything just works out of the box. You might have trouble with bleeding edge hardware but in year or two stuff gets done and keeps working. You might encounter issues on some cheapo laptops with broken ACPI implementations but those are just trouble in general.

I’m not surprised. Very few people can afford hardware to drive such displays at native resolution so 1440p is usually though of as a good balance. The other issue would be that it’d have to either kinda big or you’ll have to deal with display scaling which is not great on Windows.

I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop for cheap (an employee perk) for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u, 16GB of RAM, fast NVMe drive) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.

Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.

I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I’m not a Linux newbie by any means but these days it’s home server stuff and the like. I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.

After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.

Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.

This is not up to Harris or politicians to fix, they are not capable of getting people out of this. They will just let you down in new and innovative ways. You talk about the changes they are doing now but I was talking the changes that they’ll need to get reelected in the future - it will be grim and similar to what’s happening all over Europe. Centrist liberal parties are becoming indistinguishable from parties they lost power to (Labour in UK, Renaissance in France, Civic Platform in Poland). It will discourage even more people from participating in politics.

People need to get out in front before it happens to minimise the damage. This means more respect towards people we don’t agree with and that unfortunately includes less poo slinging at bigots. This also means less involvement in treating symptoms because it depletes our capacity for change („orphan-crushing machine”).

Yeah, that’s what I’m warning you about. This approach has been tried. Whatever happens, it was already decided because you’re not going to course correct at eleventh hour and root cause of general discontent is much deeper than you want to admit.

If you lose you’ll go into democratic resistance, fight every single thing Trump does. By second or third year regular people notice that not much is changing in their lives and then you lose all of your steam. When actual bad stuff happens nobody cares.

Then in a couple of terms people will get tired of the right, vote for the libs and then you realise that those Dems have adopted lots of stuff Republicans did because that was the only way to get back into power. And that it was always about power. I’ll be there to say „told you so”.

I’m trying to explain to Dem voters that their moral high ground and calling everyone a Nazi will lead Republican voters to entrench in views pushed by far right even if they didn’t hold them before. Dem voters are supposed to be the smart ones so they should understand that, right?

In what ways will it be worse / more Nazi than under Nixon? Healthcare? Infrastructure? Minority rights? Black rights? Waging wars and supporting genocide in some third world country? Sorry to break it to you but US was always a borderline fascist state and that includes Democrats.